Why Hyper is making me hyper — the answer will surprise you!

I remember sitting with Christian Chabot, Chairman and Co-founder of Tableau Software, over lunch in NYC back in 2010. I was smitten with the potential of Tableau, but shared my biggest concern...

“Tableau is going to enable users to create better looking charts faster — a lot more of them — and they won’t necessarily help make better business decisions.”

Almost eight years later, I’m extremely glad my prediction was not 100% true! There is amazing work being done and 15,000 raving customers rocked the annual conference. But, being 100% accurate doesn’t matter here. There’s a long way to go to raise the overall level across the industry. The majority of authoring I see reflects my concern, and I expect you agree. I’m sharing this story as background to now make three predictions about Hyper.

First

Hyper is the most important addition to Tableau, well, since Tableau.

Companies will integrate data (into Tableau) they previously avoided due to long extract times.

For dashboards following best practices and are still slow, but tolerated, Hyper is a savior.

Impatient to analyze your data — Hyper brings us closer to “working at the speed of thought.”

Second

Desktop and Server upgrades will leap to 10.5. Organizations have comprehensive plans for moving to new software versions. There’s a lot at stake, so it’s common to wait several releases. Hyper will drive upgrades.

Third

Here's the surprise I promised. Hyper might accelerate and amplify my original concern!

“Hyper will enable existing bad habits. It will increase the performance of slow, poorly designed dashboards and users will have no incentive to follow best practices.“

SO WHAT NOW!?

Don’t allow bad behavior! This is a rare opportunity to assess the output your organization has produced — and equally important how it goes about doing that. As I like to say, “You know how to work Tableau, now make Tableau work for you.”

Shift your point of view from reporting to authoring stories. You will organically find yourself having the right amount of information and content on each page (dashboard), if your stories focus on decision-making and action-taking.